Logic of Ouroboros

April 16, 2008

Re-reading Erik Hornung's Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt I was reminded of how smart Egyptology can be. It is a pleasure to read when it is not narrowly focused on archeological data. Ancient Egyptian religion, as a well-attested and long-lived tradition predating Greek philosophy, is a uniquely effective springboard for talking about human responses to the world.

The picture above is of "the sun god as a child within the Ouroboros." Hornung uses this as an illustration of the way Egyptian gods are subject to the same forces of dissolution as human beings; they are in no wise outside time and matter:

They begin with time, are born and created, are subject to continuous change, age, die, and at the end of time sink back into the chaotic primal state of the world. [165]

That position for the gods is a long way from traditions like Christianity or Islam in which God sits outside and above time and whatever else.

This has implications for logic as well. Hornung points out that comprehending the Egyptian way of viewing the world is difficult because its theological beliefs are hard to reconcile with each other. This theology could be thought of as illogical.. an example of poor thinking.. but Hornung tries to set these contradictions within the frame of a more open system of logic. The one and the many in his schema are complementary: "god is a unity in worship and revelation, and multiple in nature and manifestation" (242).

Some view like this seems natural given the non-existence of any standpoint outside and above the Ouroboros that represents chaos and the primeval world. Without any such standpoint it would seem that the polytheistic frame of the Egyptians would yield something very much like post-structuralist thought.. which develops a way of thinking about philosophy within a world in which there are no transcendent points of view.

Hornung sounds like he is in dialogue with these same ideas as he writes in his conclusion:

All the evidence suggests that human society of the near future will be pluralistic and undogmatic—or it will not exist at all. In spheres of life it will have to allow for the multiplicity of possibilities, without excluding the one as an extreme case. [254]

This is from 1971.. and that "have to" might be modified today.. valiant attempts being made to beat back pluralism. Hornung's formulation has the advantage of allowing for the subjective dedication to "one" but the coexistence of many as a reality.

I count this polytheistic view of the world as being akin to the Old Roads philosophy since it "places in doubt 'eternal values' to which we aspire and wrenches our thinking away from its all too familiar paths" (255). That "wrenching" is exactly the benefit of studying an ancient religious system like that of Egypt. We get trapped into frames that are quite difficult to break out of.. and I just find it less helpful to read modern philosophy than to move backward and attempt to understand the complexities of a distant culture.

At the conclusion of Jan Assman's Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt he writes something similar about the value of studying a distant culture:

We cannot recross this threshold in the history of consciousness, but we can at least make ourselves aware of what we have left behind, if only not to fall into the error of thinking that our view of the world is in any way natural, self-evident, or even universal. It is not; quite the contrary, it is extreme, and it results from a series of distinctions and exclusions that began with the Exodus from Egypt. [407-8]

Just to see that there are other paths.. missed paths.. and that we did not have to wind up here. It is not deconstruction.. more an opening of the eyes to possibility.